God, we could have kept so much more of the money you helped us raise for Coming & Crying than we did.

At the very beginning, the concept was an intervention on publishing. I joked that one of the leading figures/punching bags in indie book publishing would never deign to put out a book on sex unless they could give it some twee title, like “Coming & Crying.” Why was I even thinking of taking a sex book to an indie publisher who has a lousy track record (with one notable early exception, an author who we ended up publishing in our book) with sexuality — especially sexuality as centered in the lives of nonheterosexual, nonmale writers’ lives? Because sex publishers are a ghetto of their own. They can get away without paying people much because they have almost no competition, and they do very little in return. (One reportedly uses the publisher’s lovers as unpaid intern editors.)

So what did we do? We opted to pay ourselves very little, for total control. We didn’t become publishers because no one wanted to publish this book. (The only major agents and editors we spoke to approached us. One turned us down, and we turned the other’s advice down, but kindly in both cases.) Truly, we published this book because we knew it was wanted. We knew your names, your blogs, and later, when you got the book, your hands and faces (and pets and bedrooms, which is more than I can say for the guys I slept with in Europe this spring during the ashcloud).

So. We could have been wealthier, cash-wise. We could have had Lulu print on demand for a few grand. We could have not paid the writers, the photographers, the designer. We could have split what would have been a more than healthy advance for a small press anthology. But we opted for a different kind of wealth: our own infrastructure, our own people getting a check (not huge ones, but 20% of what Meaghan and I each got), our own press made possible by all of you. Community-supported publishing.

As much as we need more honest stories, and in particular more stories about sex in our own names, from our own lives, we need the means to ensure they make it out into the world in an enduring form. With the amount of books that moved through one indie book store, we were advised by an indie publishing veteran, the majority had to be sold through in-store discovery. These weren’t Tumblr people. These weren’t New York media bloggers. These weren’t any one sort of people. They found the thing itself curious enough to open and discover without any of this backstory.

This is just what got us here.

At the register, on your nightstand, in eager hands, it’s only another book.